Popperian Falsifiability on Enterprise Architecture Is Suitable from a Scientific Standpoint?

Abstract

Enterprise architecture (EA) is defined as a high-level strategic modeling, which has been shaped to help managers deal with the complexity of the business environment. Just as many areas of knowledge have been the focus of researchers on what regards testing and verifying them as scientific or not, EA is the focus for the analysis conducted in this study. Among the many scientific demarcation criteria are the philosopher Karl Popper's ideas, which only consider as scientific theories that can be properly tested and are falsifiable. This study aims to analyze how studies related to EA, considering Popper's scientific demarcation criteria, contribute to the acknowledgement of EA as suitable from a scientific standpoint. In an extensive literature review, EA studies that focused on business management in international databases were sought after. The results, when analyzed under the rules that guide the methods used on EA studies, lead to the inference that despite having made great progress, EA still has a long way to go on the search for expansion and maturity of the analyzed criteria.